McNeil was convicted in 1998 of suffocating his 3-year-old daughter during an overnight stay at his apartment in Bloomington. Lawyers with the Illinois Innocence Project have argued that forensic evidence and affidavits developed since the conviction support McNeil’s innocence claim.
In his previous rulings, Judge William Yoder excluded much of the potential new evidence the defense can use at the evidentiary hearing. He will allow the defense team to present limited evidence of its theory that authorities ignored a second suspect, McNeil’s former girlfriend Misook Nowlin, who went on to kill her mother-in-law.
Affidavits from Nowlin’s daughter and a second witness allege that Nowlin’s former husband Don Wang told them that Nowlin confessed to killing McNeil’s daughte, Christina.
Evidence that Nowlin physically abused her own daughter also will be permitted at the upcoming hearing. On Wednesday, Yoder turned over records provided under a subpoena to the Department of Children and Family Services. The records sought by the defense contain information about Nowlin’s child abuse.
McNeil’s four-day bench trial that ended with a sentence of 99 years in prison did not include testimony or evidence of Nowlin as a possible suspect.
The defense has spent more than a decade investigating new leads, seeking DNA tests and reviewing hundreds of pages of police records in preparation for an evidentiary hearing."
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
------------------------------------------------------------------
YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
